Tantric ritual does often involve deliberate inversions and transgressions of normal social laws and sexual taboos; but these are closely guarded by ritual secrecy and generally tend, in the end, to re-assert the power of the elite, male, well-educated Brahmins as the ritual experts who alone have the authority to overstep conventional social boundaries. For he was, on the one hand, deeply rooted in the late Victorian Christian world, reflecting the obsessive concern with sexuality and sexual deviance in the late nineteenth century. University of Chicago Press, ,